Fiction – Beeps

(This would be the opening of chapter two, had the main character not had second thoughts about who he was and become the protagonist of a completely different book instead. Since I have nothing better to post today, you get this. Sorry about that. I like it mostly because it contains the phrase “Some bastard had installed the sun in my living room” (Note: This text contains an amount of commas that would cause grown editors to wince. I know. Sorry.))

2 – Beep.

Fast forward a couple of hours.

This room is a more expensive version of the previous one. That is, the ceilings are lower, but the flats are purpose built and people have their own mailboxes. It is furnished stylishly, yet effectively. A bookshelf dominates one wall, a bed another, and there’s a desk and doors to the kitchen and other handy places. Every single surface is stacked with clothes, books, DVDs and/or tea cups. You may call it chaos, or entropy, or just a mess. I call it Home, because I sleep here. Temporarily.

I have, in fact, quit my job. Exceptionally so, in fact. I am more quitted from that job than any man has a right to be.

You may consider that printing my resignation letter on enough A3 sheets to wallpaper my bosses office is overkill, but I would counter with the fact that it leaves nothing left to describe the action of neatly papering not only his desk, but also all its contents individually in further copies of my notice.

I gave him a full twenty seconds to appreciate this yesterday morning before a postman – my brother, as a matter of fact – asked him to sign for a special delivery version of the self same letter. This didn’t go down well, as you may imagine, and I spent the rest of the day wavering between drunk and sober as different people came to congratulate me. And now, terribly hungover, I was being woken up at some gods unfair time of the morning by beeping.

In this digital world, it is occasionally difficult to identify precise sources of beepery. It could be a lorry reversing somewhere outside, or a bread machine, possibly an expiring smoke alarm battery. My computer, for example, beeps when it gets mail about other computers being unhappy, this being a major part of my job. It is difficult to precisely determine the differing frequencies of these with your head under a duvet, so I carefully let down this barrier between myself and the outside world.

Some bastard had installed the sun in my living room.

Careful reconsideration a little while later brought me to the realisation that it was not, in fact, the sun. Or rather, it was merely the rays of the sun coming from its usual position somewhere a way away. Adjusting my eyes to daylight took a little while, as did finding my glasses, but I eventually got up and into the process of making tea in preparation for my first day of jobhunting. Kettle, Tap, Beeps, Water, Boil, Beeps, Mug, Teabag, Water, Wait, Beeps. Hmm. Beeps.

It wasn’t the bread maker, or lorries reversing. The smoke alarm was silent, and the computer didn’t need to tell me about things I was no longer being paid for. What the hell was that beeping noise?

In the corner, plugged into the wall as it had been for almost two years now, was the mobile phone I’d bought a week before starting the job I’d just left, who had given me a work issued phone which I had been using pretty exclusively ever since. I recognised the phones insistent “You have missed calls” beep at almost exactly the same time I remembered the one person who had its number. My dive for the phone would have been more impressive had I not tripped on a box and stabbed myself with a coffee table on the way.